James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

CG Art

Contact

or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

Permissions

All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

I was amazed as I worked over a two hour period how fast the scene changed from minute to minute. Watch this time lapse video of a similar cloud formation boiling away. As soon as you have the shapes established, you have to paint the details from memory. But you can keep studying the scene for the overall color relationships.

The brightest whites and the sharpest details are reserved for the emerging billows at the top. The purer white colors of the closer clouds transition more toward warm pink or dull orange as the clouds go back in space. Light that has traveled farther has lost more of its cool wavelengths through scattering.

Whenever you paint these attention-grabbing "cumulus castellanus" thunderheads, look also for the shreds of old clouds sheared off by wind currents and dissolving back into the air. These often-overlooked “fractus” or “scud” clouds are the other side of the cloud’s life cycle of growth and decay. They lack the compact density of the billowing clouds, and are never as white.

8 comments:

So that's what I've been doing wrong all this time- the bit with the warmer tones farther back. Thank you!

I just have to say, you've probably taught me more through this blog in a few weeks than the vast majority of my college professors did in a year. Thank you for putting all this stuff out there- you explain things so a normal human being can understand, which is definitely needed.

This post and the last brought up a question; when you post these images, are you photographing them or scanning them? When you prepare artwork for publication, how does the printer capture the original paintings? I'm interested in having prints made of my artwork but I'm afraid the local print shop won't know what they are doing with a big piece of canvas. Is there a way to photograph artwork from home that will capture the image faithfully? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Thanks, Sean, for your generous words. I'm glad you're learning from the blog, and I can tell you that I'm learning from writing it, because it's forcing me to think everything through.

Meredith, I shot most of the images for this blog on my digital camera. Sometimes they were shot in a hotel room or a parking lot, so the light isn't always ideal.

Art that's going to be reproduced in a book or prints is professionally shot. The art in the new Dinotopia book was shot by Arthur Evans of Williamstown, MA both in 4x5 transparencies and high-res digital files.

We got much better results from the trannies, so we used those for reproduction in the book. Mr. Evans used a special lighting system to bring out the 3-D textural surface of the paingings.